13083 and our freedom

You can certainly understand why President Clinton would try to sneak Executive Order 13083 by Congress and the American people.

He nearly did.

Until WorldNetDaily discovered this unconstitutional abomination and exposed it, Clinton was on his way to the biggest power grab by the federal government since the Civil War.

Clinton is an arrogant, power-mad demagogue. The move was bold. But it was in character with a man who has no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law. It shouldn’t have surprised us. Until state and local officials rose up in anger and demanded EO 13083 be nullified, Clinton had succeeded in subverting the 10th Amendment — voiding it, abrogating it, obliterating it.

EO 13083 would have justified federal intervention in any issue for any reason. There is simply no other reasonable way of interpreting it. It would have reduced state and local government to, at best, advisory status. I say, “at best” because Clinton didn’t even bother to consult with state and local officials before issuing EO 13083.

Until the political pressure rose, Clinton was even proud of what he had done. Within months, Paul Begala was boasting of how Clinton would step up use of the executive order as a tool of governing, going over the heads of Congress.

“Stroke of the pen, law of the land,” Begala said. “Kinda cool.”

Remember that?

Clinton finally agreed to “suspend” EO 13083. Now we know why. Apparently a deal had been struck whereby a group of equally unscrupulous governors would do his dirty work for him. It seems the National Governors’ Association, comprised of mostly Republicans, has been working on a plan to offer a perhaps slightly rewritten version of EO 13083 to the president for reconsideration — thus providing Clinton the political cover he would need to rewrite the Constitution in a blatantly illegal way.

Worse yet, one of the until-now secret justifications for this action by the governors was to push through a plan for the institution of a national identification card, which was only recently rejected by the Congress, again, after sufficient heat was generated by another series of stories broken in WorldNetDaily.

The biggest question raised by all this is: Why would the nation’s governors support a clearly unconstitutional executive order that would virtually strip them of all meaningful authority and sovereignty?

I can’t answer that question — yet. But, I pledge to you it will be a central focus of my work for the coming weeks as I do everything in my power to expose this abuse of power, this un-American action, this grave threat to our rights and freedom.

We will be contacting every single governor in all 50 states to put them on the record on two important issues — their positions on E0 13083 and the institution of a national ID card. I recommend you do the same.

However, perhaps a clue to the agenda of the National Governors’ Association is provided at the organization’s Website.

Listed prominently at the bottom of the site’s opening page is a link to a group called HandsNet, which is listed as an “information partner.”

Hmmmm. HandsNet, for the uninitiated is a well-funded coalition of neo-fascist busybodies which, if it succeeded, would turn America into just another “people’s republic”-style gulag. It promotes the lobbying efforts of Friends of the Earth, the Children’s Defense Fund, National Organization of Women, Americans for Democratic Action, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Planned Parenthood, National Council of La Raza, the National Education Association and other pseudo-liberal causes.

Funny, I never thought of those groups having strong Republican ties. Yet, here is the National Governors’ Association, dominated, presumably, by Republicans, giving great prominence to their work — most of which advances bigger federal government, socialism, more intrusion into private lives, strangulating regulation, etc.

So who’s conning whom? Has HandsNet put one over on the governors? Is the National Governors Association a wolf in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as a group representative of its constituency but with a much different agenda? Or have the nation’s Republican leaders simply been misrepresenting their own agenda to the American people?